Maker Faire and (disconnected) Things

Monday, November 22, 2010

I
attended Maker Faire
last month. It was my first full Faire though I had been following
Make Magazine from the beginning. For me Maker wasn’t so much about
the projects as my personal sense of hacker culture in which we can learn
by doing and are driven by curiosity rather than business models.

I grew up in a “maker” culture with my father being in business for
himself manufacturing products for the TV repair industry among others. I
have early memories of the time he manufactured arcade games. I remember
Electronic Row on Cortland St in New York and Radio Shack from the days when
you’d go there to test vacuum tubes.

The Faire takes a broad view of projects ranging from crafts to
sophisticated electronics. It made me think about what is different about
electronics and, more to the point, about software and how the concepts of
software color my view of the faire.

Electrons make it easy to build systems that are components in larger
systems. Software goes even further in using bits as an alphabet. Unlike
electrons bits are simply representations of ideas rather than objects with
physical limits. We can look at the things we make as ends in themselves. I
look at them as starting points for how much more I can do with them.

In junior high school in 1963 I learned to program and I found software
resonated with me in a way that hardware projects did not.

Writing a program to generate prime numbers is not all that removed from
building a circuit to make lights blink but I could build far more
sophisticated “things” and share them with others. By the time I finished
high school in 1966 I was doing production software for online information
systems.

How do we get the same kind of leverage using hardware components?

I find that I really enjoyed building things other people use but I’ve
never been satisfied with “just software”. This is why I went from
mainframes to personal computers as they became available and today I’m
excited about the new generation of devices that allow me to use my software
skills to make things and make things that do things.

One of the most interesting projects at the faire was a collar for lions
(by Ground Lab) which combined a GPS
with a cellular radio and also allowed for downloading Python code. In
effect each lion has a cellular phone number. This gives new meaning to
“roaming charges”. Fortunately for the lion the cellular carrier is giving
them free service.

Taking advantage of cellular technology is the right approach for this
project but longer term we need to avoid having to depend on a provider for
community infrastructure.

If we are to achieve a real “Internet of Things” we need to understand
that the power of the Internet comes from allowing us to focus on our
application and not all the stuff in the middle. It’s hard to do interesting
things if each chip requires a billing relationship with a provider. Worse,
each chip must justify its value to a provider.

Fortunately lions are valuable and we can find money to track 2000 lions.
The charity model doesn’t scale for health care – we shouldn’t have to
justify the need to connect each medical device one-by-one. This is why we
need infrastructure rather than a choice of services.

We have a number of efforts to connect sensors and devices but these tend
to be within communities. They solve their local problems but it’s difficult
to address the larger issue until we can connect devices at any scale.

I’ve written about this issue in the framing of “Ambient
Connectivity”. We need to shift our thinking from a concept of
communicating by negotiating a path to the concept of relationships
independent of the path.

It
is an architectural model. We can act as if we have simple connectivity
even if we have traditional telecom paths in the middle. Once we’ve paid
for the connection we can act as if it were infrastructure. But it isn’t
infrastructure so we must not confuse our work-arounds with a full
solution.

One of my reasons for going to the Faire was the
Netduino. The Netduino was inspired by the
Arduino. I am excited by the Arduino because it takes this hardware and
democratizes it by aiming at those whose focus is on a project like an
animated sign rather than on the electronics itself. It democratizes the
technology.

The idea of small programmable devices is not new. They are exciting for
those us who know something about hardware but shift the emphasis to adding
capabilities with software. Parallax
with their BASIC stamp has been making such devices for nearly 20 years.

The Arduino
open source hardware experience is related to Chris Anderson’s
philosophy. The goal is as much to build a community as sell individual
devices. Others can add to the community as they make their own devices.
This is not an entirely new idea – Radio Shack in the 1970’s found that the
existence of competitors helped create a category (electronics hobbyist
stores). Open source is another example of shifting business models
towards creating a community.

The Netduino is similar to the Arduino but uses Microsoft’s “Micro
Framework” and is programmed using the C# language. Whereas I see the
Arduino making hardware capabilities accessible without requiring strong
hardware or software skills the Netduino strikes me as a gift to those of us
who want to take advantage of our software skills.

A full discussion of the choice of programming language and capabilities
is beyond the scope of this essay. It’s not just the programming language
itself but also the hardware and software environment.

Microsoft has heritage as a software company providing tools for the
early personal computers. We can see this in the approach it has taken in
building C# and the .Net environment which has a set of tools and
capabilities that can be mixed and matched. You can get access to native
capabilities of the hardware while getting the full capabilities of modern
programming language

In addition to the Netduino Microsoft has created its own building
blocks. The micro framework was originally used for Microsoft’s SPOT watch
and meant for creating accessories for PCs but those products did not fare
well for want of the right business model. By making those tools available
to hackers I expect to see some very interesting results.

The Mono project is an open
source effort built on C# and tools. It can leverage Microsoft’s tools or be
used without any Microsoft dependency.

Personally I’ll use whatever tools I need to get a job done and I find
that C# gives me a lot of leverage and the tools provide dynamic assistance.
This gives me the freedom to explore ideas and experiment.

One part of the Arduino community is the “shields” or accessory boards
that add capabilities. Many of these also work for the Netduino. The shields
include boards that allow for simple wireless communications among the
boards.

While there were devices at the faire that allow one to “print” physical
objects it’s hard to make a device like a “watch”. I put the word “watch” in
quotes because it’s not really about time. It’s about the form and placement
on the wrist – a location that makes it easy to quickly view and reach the
device.

In 1993 I wrote a memo at Microsoft I titled “seize the wrist”. I was
excited to see the Texas Instruments
watch. It’s what Microsoft’s
SPOT watch should’ve been. There have been a number of wrist-based
platforms but the TI piece is useful out-of-the box so it’s useful and then
I can learn what more I can do with it. Sony has just announced their
LiveView as a display surface but it’s not a hackable device in itself
but still exciting. These
are not really timepieces as much convenient and connected display surfaces.

The Ti watch uses a simple wireless protocol so you can communicate with
the watch. With simple software to relay packets we can connect the device
to the world.

What will I do with the “watch”? I don’t know. That’s the importance of
lowering the barrier to hacking and experimenting. Too much of what we call
innovation is associated with creating companies and investors. We need to
put greater emphasis on creating opportunity to explore and discover. How
else will we find answers to questions we haven’t even formed yet? Sure a
device like the X-Prize can spur some innovation but only along a path
already laid out. This is why VC’s invest in people who can find new paths.

Even better is when individuals driven by their own needs and curiosity
can discover answers to questions people are not yet asking.

This is why leverage is so important. The Netduino in particular builds
on billions of dollars of development so I can do an interesting project
over a weekend. That’s what I’ve been able to do with software and I’m now
increasingly able to move beyond the glass screen and into the physical
world.

This is why I’m excited about “open” consumer hardware to include the
open Rumba. People have also discovered how to write programs for Canon
cameras even if there is no official support. The dirty secret is that all
of these devices are computers with standard backplanes and interfaces and
often have diagnostic interfaces needed by the manufacturers for diagnostics
and updates. Open APIs are even coming to cars!

These devices in isolation are very interesting but become far more
exciting when they start forming relationships. I want to write a simple
program that can run on my cell phone to display incoming messages on the
watch. What is important is that I can implement this myself and discover
what else is possible. I don’t need to wait for a manufacturer to decide to
market it as a feature. If I do it myself I can learn from experience and
rapidly improve the capability.

The key is simplicity – the ability to add such software myself as one of
my personal projects. And then I can share it with others without the need
to hold it back in order to monetize it.

Today it’s hard to experiment with connected devices because it takes so
much effort merely to exchange bits. We tend to solve problems within local
communities or islands.

This is why I’m putting such emphasis on shifting from telecommunication
companies providing services to doing it ourselves. It’s the difference
between being dependent upon railroads and driving using roads and paths.
Knowing that we have roads and sidewalks provides us with the opportunity to
travel and exchange goods.

Business or funding models are important. Today’s telecom model funds
infrastructure by selling high value services. We need a different approach
that allows us to focus on the application at hand rather than being limited
by a service provider.

I write about this as Ambient Connectivity.
The first step is to fund infrastructure. Once we can assume an
infrastructure we can then focus on what we do with the opportunity.

And once we can assume connectivity infrastructure we can then focus on
taking advantage of relationships. How do we connect a light switch to a
light if we are no longer restricted to using a wire? Even better if we
could take the same approach whether we put a physical switch on the wall or
implemented it as software.

It also brings us back to the real, physical world around us, to the
chair I’m sitting in. Think about the motorized seats in your car. Small
motors are a great example of what one can do with devices – they don’t just
make it easier to move the seats, they allow us to use software to control
them. Imagine a next generation that has sensors that work to adapt the seat
to me and then share the position information with the seat in another car.
This is not Web 2.0, its reality.

The concept of telecommunications has a pervasive corrosive effect.
Returning from Maker I was at JetBlue’s T5 terminal at JFK. But I couldn’t
just connect my devices. I had to login to a web browser simply to click on
a screen designed by a lawyer to agree to something I didn’t read. I can’t
use an Arduino or my TI Watch because some lawyers confuse the web with the
Internet connectivity.

If we are to achieve the potential of a connected world we need to fund
infrastructure as infrastructure and understand that there is a very wide
world beyond the web.

One last observation – the attendees at the Faire didn’t reflect the
“color” of New York. Few Asians, Hispanics, people of color. This is an
important issue since the curiosity evinced by Maker attendees is the kind
of skill that lays the ground work for success in a changing society.